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CLIENT STORY

National Institute of Health Research: Taking a critical step towards a cure for dementia

To help match interested volunteers with dementia research groups, PA developed a public-facing web portal, Join Dementia Research, on behalf of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) and its partners, Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Research UK.

We applied our extensive expertise in agile delivery and business change to create a portal in just 16 weeks that delivered a high quality user experience for the different stakeholder groups. Our agile approach included giving research groups and potential volunteers the opportunity to feedback on each new version of the portal, and scheduling development work around a series of fortnightly ‘sprints’ to drive the project forward. We also used cloud technologies to provide a solution that would work for the dispersed research groups. This will also help keep running costs for the portal low and allow it to be easily scaled up in future.

Join Dementia Research has proved a huge success. Within a month of the portal’s formal launch, over 5,000 volunteers had registered their interest in being part of research studies, and more than 80 research organisations were using the site to link up with over 6000 volunteers. By bringing volunteers and researchers together, we are helping to move a cure for dementia one step closer.

"The Department of Health oversee the commissioning of the National Institute for Health Research, which includes the provision of information services. The Department selected PA Consulting Group from the G-cloud framework, following a value for money selection process as part of the G-cloud services. PA have enabled the NIHR to do a quantum leap in technology provision, by moving the business services technology to a cloud-based set of services. These services provide a level of collaboration over a range of hosted research management services that had been impossible for decades. In the three years working with PA the NIHR has taken a 10-year advancement in technology deployment to fully the business needs of a highly distributed environment."

Peter KnightDeputy Director at the Department of Health for Research ContractingInformation Intelligence and Stakeholder Engagement